Ghost Writer Reviews

[Ace]

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703315004575073313173862620.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines

Wall Street Journal: Beneath pulpy plot, profundity; 'Ghost Writer' is a witty—and riveting—thriller

By JOHN ANDERSON

'The Ghost Writer'

Adam Lang, the former British prime minister portrayed by Pierce Brosnan in "The Ghost Writer," can't leave America. Having played lapdog to an unnamed American president, he's been indicted the International Criminal Court for crimes that involve illegal renditions and torture. So if he wants to avoid arrest, he'll have to hole up in some rogue state that doesn't recognize the ICC—Iran, perhaps, or North Korea, or more likely the U.S.

Rare will be the viewer not looking for ironies in "The Ghost Writer" and finding them. Start with the plot, with its inescapable echoes of Mr. Polanski's own situation. The point is, there's really no agenda in Mr. Polanski's film except as regards secret governments, the CIA, the accommodations that the powerful often make to immorality and the telling of an exhilarating, intelligent, character-driven tale of political intrigue.

Compared to "Shutter Island," Mr. Polanski's film (adapted from a novel of the same title by Robert Harris, who co-wrote the screenplay) practically comes with a GPS system. Like the other film, "Ghost Writer" begins with a boat docking—albeit without its key passenger, a writer and personal confidante of the former prime minister who's been helping Lang write his memoirs. After the scribe washes up in the Martha's Vineyard surf, a replacement "ghost" (Ewan McGregor) is hired, handed a brutal deadline and the task of translating Lang's stultifying memoir into commercially viable prose. Then all hell breaks loose, as the World Court prepares to prosecute and our ghost discovers far more about his collaborator, and his predecessor, than is good for his health.

Mr. Polanski is a magician, his movie a synthesis of Mr. Harris's sturdy narrative, a Mamet-like appreciation for the shadows that lurk between words, and a drollery that most directors wouldn't even think about attaching to a thriller.

But "Ghost" is far more than a suspense film, and its cast is a cache of jewels—the most glittering of which is Olivia Williams, who, in a virtuoso performance as Lang's wife Ruth, creates a character who defies all casual adjectives. Manipulative? Macbethian? Clintonian? No, Ruth Lang is sui generis, a sexy/fearsome, teeth-baring seductress who, when not simply radiating intelligence, is disposed to stalking the dunes in a cowl that makes her seem like the French Lieutenant's Woman crossed with Hillary Clinton.

Ruth suppressed her own political career for the sake of her husband's, and because she's just barely of an age when such sacrifices were expected, she's all the more bitter for it. Adding to her angst is her husband's in-house mistress, the provocatively named Amelia Bly. Amelia is played by a Kim Cattrall who is virtually unrecognizable, partly because she's so good. Who knew there was such subtlety behind Samantha Jones?

And yes, the boys are good, too. Spectacular, actually. Mr. McGregor is a remarkably versatile player, and Mr. Brosnan, while not mimicking Tony Blair in any way, does nail the type of man for whom authority has become a casual vice. (During a press conference, Lang lapses into Churchill, and it's hilarious). Add Tom Wilkinson, as a dubious academic, and Robert Pugh, as one of Lang's political rivals, and "The Ghost Writer" is so rich you may feel you paid too little for your ticket when the whole thing meets its very Polanski-ish climax. Please don't tell anyone.

—John Anderson contributes film criticism and coverage to a variety of publications. Joe Morgenstern is on vacation.

[Ace]

www.movieline.com/2010/02/in-theaters-the-ghost-writer.php?page=all

MovieLine

In Theaters: The Ghost Writer

Written by Michelle Orange | 19 Feb 2010

An efficient suite in the mode of Hitchcock’s pure cinema, the opening of The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski’s eminently suave town-car thriller, relaxes willing viewers right into the director’s velvet grip. It comprises the arrival of a night ferry and the evacuation of the below-deck parking lot: an abandoned mini-SUV grows conspicuous; eventually it is all that remains.

Cinematographer Pawel Edelman’s ever-watchful camera moves in for a closer look just as a tow truck clamps down on the unclaimed vehicle’s bumper, causing it to blink its lights and mewl in a protest that seems both witty and forlorn. In fact it is a hedge against the true alarm of the next image, that of an ocean-battered corpse. Just like that, we have received much of the information we will need to follow the conspiracy-driven storyline that unfolds. We have also been notified of Polanski the playful ironist’s return to slow-boiling, street-slickened noir.

As though finding the friend it was searching for, in the next scene the camera lands on Ewan McGregor, playing an English writer known only as “The Ghost,” and never leaves his side. In a delightfully crass horse-trading scene with his agent (Jon Bernthal) and the CEO of a publishing conglomerate named Rhinebeck (an amusingly vulgar cameo by James Belushi), the Ghost agrees to doctor the dead-weight memoir manuscript of former British prime minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan). Bad vibes — including a post-meeting mugging and the apparent suicide of Lang’s former aide — abound, but greed ($250,000 for a month’s work) quickly outpaces The Ghost’s instincts, and the long trudge toward a moral imperative begins.

“I’m on my own,” The Ghost tells one of the accredited journalists preparing to besiege the Massachusetts residence of the exiled Lang, and indeed he is another in a long line of Polanski’s lonely men. Installed during the battering off-season on a posh island meant to evoke Martha’s Vineyard (Polanski shot the exteriors on the northern coast of Germany), The Ghost arrives just in time for a major war crimes scandal to erupt around his boss.

The least interesting and least invested of Lang’s tiny coterie, which is led by his wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) and executive assistant Abigail Bly (Kim Cattrall), initially The Ghost observes the controlled chaos at Lang headquarters — a modernist beach house of the bunker chic school — with a hired gun’s reticence. A pretty-boy politician (there are clear echoes of Tony Blair) with more charisma than actual charm, both Lang and his brain-parchingly dry memoir seem to offer little more than a day’s work. It is the bitchy cross-talk between Ruth and Abigail (who is clearly sexing her boss) and the eerie, derelict vibe surrounding the group’s self-fashioned oasis that hold the writer’s attention. Polanski lingers over this section, establishing with a steady hand the mood of isolation and pausing here and there for witty asides: a groundskeeper is observed desperately sweeping some stray grass together as the hellish high winds make a mockery of his task.

After being moved into the Lang compound and confronted with evidence of both Lang’s dishonesty and his predecessor’s suspicious death, The Ghost begins nosing around. In an ingenious bit of technological business involving a pre-programmed GPS system, he is led to the linchpin (played as the ultimate old boy by Tom Wilkinson) of what looks to be a massive, multinational conspiracy tying the British government to the bullying interests of its warmongering enfant terrible. The latent threat of danger is finally manifest; carried along by Alexandre Desplat’s tremulous, propulsive score, Polanski moves into classic, paranoiac pursuit mode for an immensely satisfying low-speed chase.

Polanski has fun with some Brit-out-of-water bricolage and doesn’t miss many opportunities to tweak the noses of a bio-hunting viewership. But despite its torn-from-the-headlines pretense (and the allusions to torture and weapons trade don’t figure as much more) he is uninterested in either political or personal statements. It’s a lighter affair, concerned more with plot moves and performance. Fans of McGregor, who gives a shiftless twist to the wide-eyed conduit he patented in Moulin Rouge, will be in Highland Heaven. Williams is also fantastic as the petulant, pragmatic ex-first lady who holds herself as an adult among squalling children, and Brosnan fairly shimmers with post-power satiation.

One of the film’s most notable ironies is the foregrounding of the writer as everybody’s towel boy in a film which such obvious fidelity to its source, a novel by Robert Harris. (The nameless Ghost is subjected to a mordantly perfunctory seduction; he is not even invited to the book’s eventual launch.) “The novel is the screenplay,” Polanski told Harris (they collaborated on the script), and indeed it is the pop lit contortions, particularly the handling of the penultimate scene’s revelation, that tart up an elegantly appointed piece of genre work. Thankfully the final word, as it were, is pure Polanski, an image of shocking darkness and startling beauty as uncanny and elliptic as its creator.

[Ace]

www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1966766,00.html

Time Magazine

BY RICHARD CORLISS

We’re all in hiding: from people who would harm us; from our deepest, darkest selves; from the slow or abrupt intrusion of death. If we emerge from our haunts, they’ll be waiting. If we stay inside, they’ll come to get us.

That mortal warning — Trust No One, possibly including yourself — is posted in nearly every movie made by Roman Polanski, 76. From his debut work at the Polish Film School, a one-minute shocker called Murder that showed a sleeping man being stabbed to death in his apartment by an intruder, to his new thriller The Ghost Writer, Polanski has plumbed the themes of isolation, persecution and claustrophobia.

In 1963 Polanski gained international attention, and a TIME cover, with Knife in the Water, which trapped two men and a woman on a small boat to play out their sexual rivalries. In the 1965 Repulsion he locked young Catherine Deneuve in a London flat and let her go picturesquely berserk. Hollywood called, with Rosemary’s Baby (1968), which imprisoned the pregnant Mia Farrow in a Manhattan condo to be preyed on by Satanists. By the end of the decade, and ever since, “Polanskian” could have been as evocative a summary of a director’s nightmare world as “Hitchcockian.”

If an auteur is a director with an obsessive personal vision — or, in simple terms, a man who keeps remaking his own movies — then Polanski is the very auteuriest. Even if he weren’t drawn to pictures about hunted, holed-up men, he could hardly avoid the connection between iconography and autobiography, for his life is at least as notorious as his films. As a child, with his Jewish parents in concentration camps, he survived the Nazis by hiding and running. In Hollywood, his blond starlet wife Sharon Tate was slaughtered by Charles Manson’s own Satanic gang. Then, after his great success with the knotty, despairing Chinatown (still his best film), there was his 1977 sexual encounter with a 13-year-old; when he thought he was sure to serve a long jail term, he fled the U.S., never to return. He seemed secure living in Paris, making films in France and Germany, until a visit to Switzerland last Sept. led to his detention on an international arrest warrant. He completed the editing of The Ghost Writer while under house arrest.

When Polanski hooked up with the novelist Robert Harris, best known for his Roman fictions Pompeii and Imperium, for a film version of Harris’s roman-a-clef The Ghost, he might have felt that the book had been written from his own recipe for paranoid suspense. It’s the story of a writer of celebrity lives — a magician’s best-seller, for instance, titled I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered — hired to add some marketable pizzazz to the memoirs of Adam Lang, a retired British Prime Minister of the Tony Blair stripe. He’s called in on this rush job because the previous ghost, Mike McAra, has died suddenly. Joining the ex-P.M. in a remote enclave on Martha’s Vineyard, he is drawn into a controversy involving Lang’s possible approval of torture on terror suspects. Soon, he thinks that McAra may have been murdered, and that he could be next. One of his sources snorts at this theory — “He can’t drown two ghost writers. You’re not kittens” — but later that source is also found dead.

The kinship to Polanski’s oeuvre is clear enough. The Ghost could be a blending of the director’s 1976 The Tenant, in which he starred as a man who rents an apartment where the previous tenant committed suicide and soon believes the neighbors are scheming to force him to kill himself, and the 1999 The Ninth Gate, in which a book dealer sleuths through a antique volume that might be the Devil’s autobiography. Need more? Lang, who becomes the focus of a war-crimes investigation in Europe, may be condemned by his past to remain in the U.S. — even as Polanski is condemned by his to keep out.

The plot of the book and the film is also weirdly similar to that of this weekend’s other new film, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, which has a stranger visiting a rainswept island near Boston after someone’s mysterious disappearance and trying to unravel a conspiracy that may threaten his life. That picture — with a gallery of unreliable characters weaving a web of lies around the baffled hero, who must discover the perpetrator by searching for clues in hidden notes — has been widely compared to Hitchcock and film noir; but it might also be Scorsese’s tribute to Polanski.

Harris, who worked for the Sunday Times and the BBC when Blair came to power, was once friendly with the P.M. but later soured on his political decisions, especially Blair’s support of the Bush Administration’s plan to invade Iraq. (With some ghoulishly good timing, Blair had to spend six hours last month defending his Iraq record in the Chilcot Inquiry.) The book, published in 2007, was widely seen as Harris’s score-settling.

In the movie, Pierce Brosnan’s Lang — the ex-actor who became head of state — at times resembles no one so much as Ronald Reagan, especially when he flashes a grin as affable as it is concealing. There’s also a Halliburton-type company, called Hatherton, that links the P.M. to George W. Bush. But Lang and Olivia Williams, in the role of his bright, prickly wife Ruth, are a good fit for Tony and Cherie Blair. Then again, they could be another political power couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton: the salesman and his less charismatic but brilliant wife. Is the woman betrayed by the man, or is she controlling him, or both? Could either a U.S. President or a U.K. Prime Minister be a Manchurian candidate, his policies programmed by an outside agency? That’s enough conspiracies even for Polanski.

From the moment he enters Lang’s island compound, the Ghost feels thwarted by the P.M. and his staff, led by Lang’s probable mistress (Kim Cattrall). Proving that a political campaign is war by other means, they form a phalanx around Lang’s achievements and vulnerabilities; their job is not to help the Ghost but to contain and confound him. His adversaries include not just people but machines. The movie begins with an empty car on the Martha’s Vineyard ferry — its driver vanished, and soon found dead — and ends with another car-related death. In the two intervening hours, several mysterious autos with malevolent intent stalk our hero. His only ally is a sedan earlier driven by McAra, whose chatty GPS leads the Ghost to a major suspect: Tom Wilkinson as a Harvard professor whose path may earlier have intersected with the Langs’.

One difference between Hollywood and European films: the first has to keep you jazzed every minute, while the second assumes that, having bought your ticket, you’ll stick around through the simmering accumulation of details. In that sense, The Ghost Writer is as comforting in its temperate pace and eerie mood as it is chilling in its plot particulars. Polanski feigns interest in the genre’s requisite chases, but he’s best at stranding the Ghost in wide frame, on a turbulent island, and tightening the noose around his neck as he gets closer to an awful truth. Alexandre Desplat’s violins saw away, in approved Bernard Herrmann fashion, as appliers and absorbers of dramatic shocks; and McGregor brings all his charm and intelligence to the vague figure of a Hitchcock hero who slips into circumstance and chicanery until he morphs into a Polanski victim.

Set mostly in Massachusetts, the movie was shot at Berlin’s Babelsburg studio, where Polanski earlier created the Warsaw Ghetto for his most explicitly autobiographical film, The Pianist, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2003. The Ghost Writer is unlikely to earn him such acclaim. The villainy surrounding its hero is vast but not, in Oscar terms, important; and there are a few giggle moments, as when one of Lang’s women pops into the Ghost’s bed. But we should hail a movie that recalls creepy political thrillers of the mid-’70s, back when some films were made for grownups and the comfortable catharsis of a happy ending was not required — think of the panoramically cryptic worldview of The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, and of course, Chinatown. In its cataloguing and deft evocation of those films, and the director’s entire body of work, The Ghost Writer may not be major Polanski, but it sure is essential Polanski.

[Ace]

At The Movies TV review with A.O. Scott (NY Times) & Michael Phillips (Chicago Tribune)

bventertainment.go.com/tv/buenavista/atm/

Direct download link:
cdn.origin.dadt.com/video/296474766/296474766_67566571001_2427-the-ghost-writer.flv

[Ace]

rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100224/REVIEWS/100229991

The Ghost Writer

BY ROGER EBERT / February 24, 2010

FOUR STARS


In Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer," a man without a past rattles around in the life of a man with too much of one. He begins by reading the work of an earlier ghost who mysteriously drowned, and finds it boring and conventional. Hired to pep up the manuscript to justify a $10 million advance, he discovers material to make it exciting, all right, and possibly deadly.

This movie is the work of a man who knows how to direct a thriller. Smooth, calm, confident, it builds suspense instead of depending on shock and action. The actors create characters who suggest intriguing secrets. The atmosphere -- a rain-swept Martha's Vineyard in winter -- has an ominous, gray chill, and the main interior looks just as cold.

This is the beach house being used by Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a former British prime minister so inspired by Tony Blair that he might as well be wearing a nametag. Lang has one of those households much beloved by British authors of country house mysteries, in which everyone is a potential suspect -- of something, anyway. Lang's wife Ruth (Olivia Williams), smart and bitter, met Lang at Cambridge. His aide Amelia (Kim Cattrall), smart and devious, is having an affair with him. The wife knows, and isn't above referring to it in front of the Ghost. Security men lurk about, and a couple of service workers look rather sinister.

Just as his new ghost writer starts work, Lang is accused by his former foreign minister of sanctioning the kidnapping and torture of suspects. The World Court prepares an indictment. It would be unwise for Lang to return to Britain, and he flees to Washington for a photo op with the U.S. administration, unnamed, although the Secretary of State looks a whole lot like Condi Rice.

The PM's story is based on a best-seller by Robert Harris, who co-wrote the screenplay with Polanski. He implies parallels between his story and the Blair and (both) Bush administrations, but uses a light touch and sly footwork so that not every viewer will necessarily connect the dots. There is also a loud clanging alarm inviting comparison between Polanski's Lang, an exile sought by a court, and Polanski himself. This is also the fourth thriller in recent months to make a villain of a corporation obviously modeled on Halliburton.

The Ghost is left to his own devices in a house haunted by the unsaid, and Polanski slips into a pure filmmaking mode. I won't describe what the Ghost searches for, but I will tell you that Polanski evokes Hitchcock in a conversation with an elderly local (Eli Wallach) and some forbidding beach scenes. And that he is masterful in the way he shows the dead former Ghost providing the new one with directions, so to speak, leading to a possible source.

There is also a Hitchcock touch in visuals where an incriminating note is passed from hand to hand; the scene is so well done that it distracts from the fact that the Ghost didn't need the information in the note to arrive at the same inference.

There are a few other loose ends. The film seems to have a high incidence of black cars designed to be used as murder weapons. It's far from clear what Ruth's emotional state is on one rainy night. The Ghost himself seems too much a lightweight to explain his daring sleuthing. But the performances are so convincing in detail that they distract us from our questions. McGregor's character has no family, little pride and much insouciance, but is very smart and doesn't enjoy his intelligence being insulted. And Olivia Williams projects the air of a wife who is committed to her husband in more than expected ways.

"The Ghost Writer" is handsome, smooth and persuasive. It is a Well-Made Film. Polanski at 76 provides a reminder of directors of the past who were raised on craft, not gimmicks, and depended on a deliberate rhythm of editing rather than mindless quick cutting. The film immerses you in its experience. It's a reminder that you can lose yourself in a story because all a film really wants to do is tell it.

[Ace]

www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/sc-mov-0223-ghost-writer-review-2-20100225,0,4551754.column

3 1/2 stars
More than one shadow in ghost writer's tale

Michael Phillips Movie critic

February 25, 2010


Plot isn't everything, unless you're "Shutter Island." On the other hand, T.S. Eliot was right: Narrative does "satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet while the poem (or the film) does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog."

The wittily sinister new film from Roman Polanski asserts Eliot's point. Narratively we know "The Ghost Writer's'" score. But director and co-writer Polanski turns a conventional conspiracy thriller into a triumph of tone, ensemble playing and atmospheric menace.

The tale itself is both topical and timelessly paranoid in its outlook. The topical bits belong mostly to novelist Robert Harris, who adapted his 2007 book "The Ghost" with Polanski. A key character in "The Ghost Writer" is a variant on former British prime minister Tony Blair, whose dogged allegiance (some would say lap-dogged) to American interests in the Iraq war provides the blueprint for the character of Adam Lang. The fictional politician resembles Blair with a Bill Clinton chaser.

Lang owes his publisher an autobiography. Enter the ghost writer, cynical but productive, played by Ewan McGregor. He's good. Even better, though, is Pierce Brosnan, positively reborn here. He brings such clever strains of bravado and insecurity to Lang, slapping his colleagues on the back one minute and stabbing them (metaphorically) the next, it's as if we're seeing a series of facades stuck in fast-shuffle mode.

Much of the film takes place in and around Lang's fabulously grim and isolated Martha's Vineyard retreat, where the unnamed ghost writer arrives to do his interviews and research. There's the question of what happened to the previous ghost, who, his employers tell him, fell off the ferry from the mainland and drowned. Lang, meanwhile, is a hated man, and his complicity in the CIA's capture and torture of terrorist suspects hasn't helped his reputation.

Will American filmgoers perceive "The Ghost Writer" as an anti-Bush polemic? Certainly some will. But Polanski is after bigger, more slippery fish. He's less intrigued by specific topical reference points (waterboarding and the like) than by the cramped corridors of power, especially domestic power, and what misdeeds lie in the shadows. Two women in Lang's life pull various invisible strings as dictated by the story. Kim Cattrall plays Lang's aide-de-camp, though she struggles, I think, to contain her natural inclination toward camp. Invaluably, though, Olivia Williams is a snappish delight as Lang's wife.

Polanski shot it before his recent arrest in Switzerland; he finished postproduction work on the film while confined to his chalet. The Swiss courts are currently wrangling with the legality of his extradition to the U.S., a matter relating to a 32-year-old arrest warrant issued after Polanski skipped sentencing for the 1977 drugging and raping of an underage female. (See the documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" to learn more. It's a terrific film from any angle.) Nothing in the storyline of "The Ghost Writer" relates to Polanski's private life. Yet when Wilkinson's subtle rotter glances at incriminating photos brought to him by the ghost writer, he notes, offhandedly, that kids today are "so much more puritanical than we were." SAnd at that moment you can almost hear the chuckle — sinister, perhaps; knowing, certainly — of the director in the wings, as he pulls the strings of Harris' plot with a flourish.

[Ace]

www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/movies/mobile/6885908.html

San Francisco Chronicle: Writing real-world wrongs{/b}
By MICK LASALLE FILM WRITER
Feb. 25, 2010, 5:41PM

FOUR STARS

A young author (Ewan McGregor, above) gets caught up in international intrigue after being hired to ghostwrite the memoirs of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan, left).


A tone pervades The Ghost Writer that's so precise and peculiar that it feels like the mark of a philosophy. This tone, one of unease and distance, tells of a modern world in which few things make sense, and yet all things senseless and horrible can be reduced to petty human motives, such as ego and greed. This tone also bespeaks a vision in which the most menacing people are sometimes the most ridiculous, but their ridiculousness doesn't make them any less dangerous. It might even make them worse. And nothing is as it seems. Modern life is presented as terrifying yet completely absurd — as something to run from and laugh at simultaneously.

Or to put it another way, The Ghost Writer is a Roman Polanski movie.

Completed when the filmmaker was 76, The Ghost Writer shows no decline in Polanski's powers, no softening of his vision, no turning away from the big canvas in favor of delicate miniatures. Indeed, The Ghost Writer is one of Polanski's better films, the work of a director in complete control and at the height of his powers. Every moment is invested with meaning. All angles, compositions and shots work in the service of a mood and an idea.

Once again, Polanski is exploring the dangers underneath the smiling surfaces of civil life, the way he did a generation ago in The Tenant (1976), Chinatown (1974) and Rosemary's Baby (1968). Back then, he seemed like an eccentric, but by 2010 standards he's practically a realist. The Ghost Writer — a fictional riff on recent events in British and American politics — denotes the moment in history when life became as nutty as a Polanski movie.

The release comes, needless to say, at a peculiar time in Polanski's own life. This is the film the director was working on months ago, when he was held in a Swiss jail, and he continued to work on it while in house arrest at his Swiss chalet. As of this writing, Polanski is still held up in court fighting extradition to the United States on a 32-year-old statutory rape conviction. But here, let's just keep it to the movie.

And what a movie it is: Ewan McGregor plays a young, glib best-selling author, who is hired to ghost the memoirs of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan). The memoirs, in fact, are almost finished, but the previous ghostwriter has died (uh-oh). He washed up on the beach — either an accidental drowning or a suicide.

McGregor, as a sharp young man just trying to make a fast buck, finds himself thrown into a strange, insular environment within the PM's Martha's Vineyard compound. The PM's staff, his wife (Olivia Williams) and his executive assistant/lover (Kim Cattrall) are all under one roof. So is the first draft of the memoir, which, for some reason, can't be taken out of the building. Plus, there's a bunker mentality: The former PM is being investigated by the World Court for war crimes, allegedly committed at the behest of the U.S. government.

Robert Harris, who co-wrote the screenplay with Polanski based on Harris' novel, has created a plot that's a sort of Tony Blair fantasia. The dark-haired outspoken wife is meant to evoke Cherie Blair. The conglomerate “Hatherton” suggests Halliburton. And Blair's good friend, the president — “why did he get mixed up with that damned fool in the White House!” — is meant to be George W. Bush.

Polanski infuses the action with the quality of a waking nightmare. He has the capacity to take a simple shot of a ship coming into harbor and give it a feeling of foreboding. His technique in The Ghost Writer is a strong argument in favor of using extended shots and precise angles as a means of creating tension, as opposed to the more modern tendency to cut fast and keep the camera in constant motion.

Even as Polanski follows the ghostwriter and involves us in the character's terrors, he deliberately creates a distance, as though reminding us that this story is really nothing unique, just the world we live in. Alexandre Desplat's cheerful musical score, which sounds like something for a 1960s romantic comedy, is in sync with Polanski's vision. It, too, keeps pulling us back, too, inviting us to watch from a critical distance.

Some will notice the unintentional parallels between Polanski's current situation and that of the prime minister in the film — both subject to legal proceedings, both restricted in their travel, both holed up in a beautiful place, in a country they can't leave. This is no way to watch movies, but such thoughts do creep in.

Here's another thought: This old man who can't leave the house has just made the first important film of 2010.

[e-mail]

[Ace]

www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/6885897.html

Houston Chronicle: Polanski: A wanted man makes a return
By ANDREW DANSBY - ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
Feb. 25, 2010, 5:37PM

FOUR STARS


Ewan McGregor stars in the title role in Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, which echoes the troubled filmmaker's previous work.


Were actor Tom Wilkinson wearing a beanie with a propeller in The Ghost Writer, his voice — crisp and cold like winter air — would remain the most mesmerizing thing about his character. His lines are precisely written, spoken and recorded and instill his character — who may or may not be at the center of a wartime torture conspiracy — with an immediate sense of cunning and gravitas.

The sound in The Ghost Writer is just one of the details that set Roman Polanski's new potboiler apart from modern thrillers. Reminiscent of the rash of post-Watergate conspiracy movies in the 1970s, the film is about an unnamed ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) hired to rewrite the memoir of a former British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) shortly before the PM is accused of approving war crimes, including torture. The film favors character and story over the thrill of the kill or an interminable car chase.The Ghost Writer is not so much a throwback as it is proof that a classic moviemaking approach can thrive in a digital world. The film's depth reveals the shortcomings of a genre that has turned to bombast for effect, and its tension suggests that bombast isn't a necessary evil.

It also ties together with so much of Polanski's body of work. Olivia Williams plays the wife of the embattled prime minister with some echoes of Lady Macbeth in Polanski's bloody Shakespearean saga; the seclusion of The Ghost Writer'sisland suggests Knife on the Water.

Polanski hasn't made a movie in the United States since Chinatown. TheGhost Writer was shot in northern Germany, although it is set in the U.S. The reasons are well documented: Polanski is under house arrest in Switzerland while he attempts to avoid extradition to California where he would be sentenced for having unlawful sex with a minor. Polanski pleaded guilty to the crime in 1978 and then fled the country. He's continued to make films, including the best-picture Oscar winner The Pianist.

The Ghost Writer is undeniably modern, from its setting — a stylish boxlike home/office compound on Martha's Vineyard — to its topical concerns. But its spirit and tone nonetheless have much in common with Chinatown, Polanski's noir masterpiece about corruption in 1930s Los Angeles. The latest film isn't as taut as its 1974 counterpart, but it does reveal Polanski, 76, to be as devious, cynical, dark and humorous as he was in his best work from decades ago.

Chinatown's Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is a weary private investigator; TheGhost Writer's “Ghost” (as he's called in the credits) is a writer of entertainment biographies. Polanski seems to relish putting un-dynamic men into labyrinthine conspiracies. Ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances is a time-honored equation that typically results in troublesome truths.

Water (and the lack of it) plays heavily in the two films. Chinatown was parched, with communities desperate because of drought. Nearly every shot in TheGhost Writer is immersed in an unending rain, perhaps reflecting a greater despair in the director's worldview. Chinatown was the third movie Polanski made after the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, and he was just 40 when he made it. He's no longer in the middle of his life, and The Ghost Writer has a go-for-broke feeling. Its characters take walks or go on bike rides despite the weather, in sort of a conspiratorial grin and shrug from the director: We're all going to get wet, so step into it.

And he does.

Polanski has made movies in tight quarters such as boats and New York apartments, so the prime minister's island home is not out of sorts with his previous work. Still, the woeful tone of the prime minister's exile in the U.S. seems to refer to Polanski's own 30-plus years of living in exile. He's not likely to find much sympathy there.

Ultimately, TheGhost Writer might not stand up as well as the more cryptic and allegorical Chinatown, which has achieved a certain timelessness as a period piece. Or perhaps TheGhost Writer will one day end up the cinematic representation of our era's suspicion of the intersection between government and business. It is neither documentary nor agitprop, though it is unflinching in connecting the fictional Adam Lang to the factual Tony Blair.

Years ago I was talking to the songwriter Steve Earle, whose work has always had a social and political bent. But at that time, shortly after the war in Iraq began, he'd started addressing specific issues of the day.

I wondered if he worried that he was shortening his songs' shelf life by dating them or that they'd be read incorrectly by later generations.

“Nah, I'm going to be dead in 25 years,” he said, laughing. “I can't worry about that; I just don't have time.”

Polanski is less a craftsman than Earle and more an artiste.

This time out he traded the safety of allegory for harder reality. His gamble still looks and sounds like great cinema, even if its arrows sink into targets that lock it in time.

[e-mail]

[Ace]

newcityfilm.com/2010/02/24/ghost-stories-escaping-the-crowd-with-roman-polanski-review/

Ghost Stories: Escaping the crowd with Roman Polanski (Review)

Political, Recommended, Thriller Add comments

By Ray Pride

Like a finely drawn sketch, the silky, serenely sinister “The Ghost Writer” implies as much as it illustrates.

Drawn from Robert Harris’ efficient 2007 bestseller, “The Ghost,” that riffs on the “special relationship” that the government of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair had with the United States, the project was taken up by Roman Polanski and Harris after financing for their $100-million adaptation of Harris’ “Pompeii” fell apart. The film’s dialogue is drawn largely from the book, but with a more precise wit and chilly twists to the talk.

After a $10 million deal for his memoirs, former P.M. Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) has been installed at his publisher’s Martha’s Vineyard retreat. After the drowning death, a possible suicide, of Lang’s longtime aide who was compiling the book, a second ghost is required. Ewan McGregor plays the title figure (never named), an efficient hack best known for “I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered,” ghosted for a celebrity magician. The acting amuses: Brosnan’s emulation of a politician’s alternately open and reserved body language, of public face and private face, is keen; McGregor’s puppyishness serves him well as he scratches for clues to a mystery he didn’t expect to roll around in; and as Lang’s wife and political partner, Ruth, Olivia William’s lovely, grave eyes suit her character, with a performance that shifts from moment to moment from watchful languor to residual disdain. Smaller roles include Kim Catrall as Lang’s close-as-this chief of staff; Jim Belushi’s brusque, bullet-domed publisher and, as a now-shadowy academic Lang knew in college, Tom Wilkinson is a marvel of sly condescension that masks brackish contempt.

Events move at a page-turner’s pace as the Ghost is caught up in Lang’s affairs, but despite the eruptions of accusations of war crimes (a reference to waterboarding suits a tale that opens with a drowning) and conflicts international and intimately domestic, Polanski’s tone is serene yet insubordinate, drawing out the hush and simmer of transactions that transpire like distant whispers.

“The Ghost” is the better title: McGregor’s unnamed ghost works within a welter of palimpsests, starting with taking over as ghost from a dead ghost. He discards the dead man’s shoes, calls phone numbers found on archive photographs of students no longer young, is betrayed by caller I.D., and finds his most serious clue from following the programming of an obstinate, talking GPS device. And of course, a memoir is writing atop a life.

“The Ghost Writer” is a brooding marvel of weather: off-season Martha’s Vineyard (shot in Germany), is gusty and gray, and the publisher’s low, flat compound, from outside not unlike a jail or barracks, has broad expanses of glass that open onto increasingly stormy skies that begin as hard horizontals of pale white and slate, and move to gray and grayer. (Cinematographer Pawel Edelman also shot “The Pianist.”) Despite the multimillion-dollar view, the design of the house is oppressive, more a work of art than a home, a fortress for the embattled politico, a jail for his new scribe. A recurrent image: a groundskeeper rakes up leaves and twigs and the wind teases them out again. There’s a tussle of debris in the wind, backscatter, like the fuss that’s about to erupt in the political world as Lang is accused by former colleagues of authorizing crimes. Those versed in British politics of the past few years will recognize parallels to the fictional conspiracies on-screen, and Lang has a Bush-like metabolism with a hunger for anaerobic strain. (Brosnan’s sweaty t-shirts become an emblem as well.) There is other cheekiness: where on earth would you come up with a company named “Hatherton”? Blend Halliburton with the Carlyle Group, stir.

Postproduction for “The Ghost Writer” was completed after Polanski’s Swiss detainment, but its portrait of isolation against the judgement of a larger world is not only prescient, but weirdly knowing. Personal work, indeed: “This is about justice” is one of many lines that resound as crowds clamor against Lang’s perfidies and crimes. Only a little was left to do, like the nicely Bernard Hermann-ish score by the prolific Alexandre Desplat (“The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “Benjamin Button,” “New Moon,” “A Prophet”). Technically, the only jarring moments are three instances where the word “fuck” has been visibly replaced to get a PG-13 rating and a well-placed Brit c-word from the book and script is replaced with a culturally non-specific “Asshole!”

Polanski frames and cuts as with a scalpel: most of the settings and framings could be called “hygienic.” The result is nippy, not icy, not cold: so much saline wit rises from the ashes of he and Harris’ sundered “Pompeii.” Polanski knows how to finish a film: after a virtuoso pair of shots, one involving a passed note at a public gathering that suggests the chain of complicity among not only the story’s players, but politics and society at large, the other a corkscrew closeup, the film crests. The sound design anticipates the ending, it blooms just perceptibly, volume rising, as you realize what has happened. The impact is coolly sardonic. It’s the depth of nightmare: a fear congealed, turned crystalline, lingering like a pen-knife to the heart. It shares the sense of rhythm, repetition and framing, as well as civic space and intrinsic political corruption that makes the last curdling moments of “Chinatown” so timeless and unforgettable.

A trifle, some reviewers have written, dismissing the exemplary embroidering of the novel’s spinner-rack satisfactions, but the filmmaking is jade and carborundum, flint, blade, spark, wink. Craft obtains. “The Ghost Writer” shimmers before it fades.

[Ace]

www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/03/08/100308crci_cinema_denby

The NEW YORKER: The Current Cinema: Prime Suspect
“The Ghost Writer.”

by David Denby


www.newyorker.com/images/2010/03/08/p465/100308_r19373_p465.jpg[/img]

Why did Tony Blair, in his ten years as Prime Minister, do exactly what the White House wanted on so many occasions? That’s the juicy question buried in the depths of Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer,” an extraordinarily precise and well-made political thriller—the best thing Polanski has done since the seventies, when he brought out the incomparable “Chinatown” and the very fine “Tess.” A few blogging goons have kneecapped the movie for not providing enough thrills, but that’s the wrong critical direction to go in. The director of “Repulsion,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” and “Macbeth” long ago put away his knives. “The Ghost Writer” offers not the blood and terror of Polanski’s early work but the steady pleasures of high intelligence and unmatchable craftsmanship—bristling, hyper-articulate dialogue (the stabs are verbal, and they hurt) and a stunning over-all design that has been color-coördinated to the point of aesthetic mania. Working with the British writer Robert Harris, whose 2007 novel, “The Ghost,” serves as the basis of the movie, Polanski fed the political material—troubling stuff about rendition and C.I.A. collaboration —into the mazy convolutions of a neo-Hitchcock story. He presents the entire movie from the restricted point of view of a likable young man, a hard-drinking, cash-poor writer (Ewan McGregor), who has been hired to finish the memoirs of Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a former Prime Minister clearly modelled on Blair. The writer, who is known in the credits as “the Ghost” (he is never named—the P.M. calls him “man”), is not the first to work at this job. The previous ghostwriter has been found dead on a beach in Martha’s Vineyard, near the house of Lang’s publisher, where the P.M. and his entourage have gathered to work on the book. The Ghost is in trouble from the beginning, and he knows it, but he needs money and self-respect, and he forges on.

The picture is set mostly in the United States, but Polanski, of course, can’t work here, so he used the drab German North Sea coast as a double for the Vineyard in winter. The publisher’s mansion has the island’s requisite gray shingles, yet it’s not some gracious Victorian affair. Instead, it’s a giant modernist shoebox, with generous interior spaces and floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on dunes and a dark ocean. The interiors are all chic designer cement walls and flat or sharply angled surfaces; there’s not a curve anywhere, and hardly a cushion. This punitive luxury was created, as a set (by Albrecht Konrad), at Babelsberg studio, in Berlin, and the views through the windows are either projections or digital reconstructions. Looking through those portals, you appear to be seeing a movie of some sort, a tone poem in gray that refuses to reveal its mysteries. The skies are ashen, the rain never stops, and the writer, when he goes out on a bicycle for some air, gets blinded by the wet. For us, this mock-American landscape is a fascinating bad dream, half familiar, half strange. The cinematographer, Pawel Edelman, turns the constant downpour and gloom into a beautiful, slate-colored curtain—or perhaps I should say shroud. Polanski wants an atmosphere of daunting indefiniteness, a subdued but enveloping field of lies and secrecy, impenetrable to the Ghost, who is lost among power players far too clever for him. I don’t know when I’ve seen menace rendered with such delicate but persistent force.

The P.M.’s manuscript is also gray—maddeningly bland and opaque, a veil of debonair evasion. As the Ghost tries to bring it to life, allegations appear in the press that Lang, when he was P.M., illegally turned over captured terror suspects to the C.I.A. for rendition and torture; a former minister from Lang’s cabinet even insists that his old boss should be tried by the International Criminal Court, in The Hague. Suddenly, the house is besieged by antiwar protesters. Playing a powerful man in exile, repudiated and hated by his own party and by many of his countrymen, Pierce Brosnan gives the strongest performance of his rather lazy career. He doesn’t imitate Blair; he offers his own interpretation of a public man’s impersonally brisk and hardened charm—the smile is reflexive, dazzling, and savage. Lang tells stories about his youth with hearty indifference to their phoniness—even in retreat, he’s a calculating pol, playing the angles, manipulating his eager amanuensis. And, when Lang is criticized or challenged in any way, Brosnan’s charm dissolves into fury; he catches the defensive self-righteousness of power, a leader’s disbelief that anyone might be seeing through him. Brosnan is matched by the wonderful English actress Olivia Williams, as Ruth, Lang’s brilliant wife and longtime political adviser. Ruth has lost her husband’s love—and, more important, his ear—and is taking it hard. Slender and tense, with short dark hair, Williams pulls her legs up under her chin as she sits in the discomforting house. (Her Ruth is so angular and hard-edged that she actually seems to belong in this place, where it’s impossible to hide.) Williams’s gaze could sear the fat off a lamb shank, and her line delivery is withering, yet Ruth is badly wounded, and Williams makes her sympathetic—she’s one of the rare actresses who seem more intelligent and beautiful as they get angrier. Polanski observes the character quirks, the long-standing relations strained by the worsening disgrace of Lang’s situation—there’s something, we see, in the frayed connection of husband and wife that could be more significant than hurt feelings. Tom Wilkinson and Eli Wallach (as a very old, entirely sane hermit living on the beach) make strong appearances, too. The only flaw in the ensemble is Kim Cattrall, who, as Lang’s assistant and mistress, can’t stop smirking (Cattrall lets us know that something dirty is going on). The movie is organically structured—nothing is overstressed, but nothing is wasted, either. The banal manuscript, for instance, assumes an almost totemic power as it’s read, handled, edited, rewritten. It contains secrets finally discovered, decoded.

Life for the Ghost takes a dangerous turn when he finds evidence that Lang is lying about many things, and becomes even more dangerous when Ruth climbs into bed with him. Ewan McGregor’s career got off track in “Star Wars” foolishness, but this movie may put him back in good roles, where he belongs. He’s such a charming actor—avid, bright-eyed, yet slightly acid and self-deprecating, too. His writer, initially no more than a sleepless, overworked hack, grows tired of being a ghost; he wants to be palpable, a man, and he asks questions of powerful people that could get him killed. Polanski takes care that the Ghost’s story is never rushed, mauled, or artificially heightened—the usual style of thrillers now (see “Shutter Island” and every week’s buddy-buddy cop movie for the latest examples). Polanski respects physical plausibility and the passage of time; he wants our belief in his improbable tale, just as Hitchcock did. There may be nothing formally inventive in this kind of classical technique, but, in the hands of a master, it’s smooth and satisfying, and I suggest, dear reader, that you gaze upon it, because it’s all but gone in today’s moviemaking world. Here it works its old magic. You understand, at every instant, what the Ghost feels and knows, and you fear for him. There’s not much violence in the movie, but your scalp tightens anyway.

“The Ghost Writer” plays off the British public’s disillusion with Tony Blair and the recurring complaints about Blair’s alleged collaboration with the C.I.A. Yet, when Lang is cornered by the Ghost, the P.M. speaks with impressive conviction. In effect, he defends the use of torture; he takes the Cheneyesque hard line, ridiculing liberals who want safety and, at the same time, the luxury of high-mindedness. The answer to the question of why he’s so acquiescent to the Americans is worked out in thriller (rather than policy) terms. It’s the kind of supposition that may strike viewers, here and in Britain, as frivolous, or just plain wrong, but it’s a fine piece of mischief—suggestive, wounding to Blair, and, as a fiction, emotionally gratifying in the way of le Carré’s conspiracy plots.

Brosnan’s performance is so forceful in the climactic scene with the Ghost that I don’t think you could easily say where Polanski’s own feelings about rendition lie. But I would guess that he’s split in his personal sympathies—he’s both the man accused of crimes and the Ghost longing to assert his full humanity. Polanski edited the movie while in jail and then under house arrest in Switzerland; the movie’s narrative of an exiled man trapped in a house overtook his own disordered life. He concludes “The Ghost Writer” with a twin flourish: first, a virtuoso travelling shot of an explosive note slowly but inexorably passed through many hands at a social occasion until it reaches its destination, and then a final shot of Lang’s manuscript, the fluttering pages now forlornly scattered about a London street. As in the famous last sequence of “Chinatown,” Polanski is close to despair, but his rejuvenation as a film director is a sign of hope. ♦

[Ace]

www.startribune.com/entertainment/movies/86366957.html

Review: "The Ghost Writer" is high anxiety

Roman Polanski brings a master's touch to a suspenseful tale of political intrigue.
By COLIN COVERT, Star Tribune

4 stars

Last update: March 4, 2010

Roman Polanski's new suspense film "The Ghost Writer" is so elegant, so deliciously scary, so masterfully controlled that you feel tingles of bliss even as your skin crawls.

Ewan McGregor stars as the unnamed Ghost and Pierce Brosnan as Adam Lang, the shifty former British prime minister whose autobiography he has signed on to salvage. The politician's first collaborator drowned accidentally before his draft was complete. Or maybe it was suicide. Or murder.

As McGregor's Ghost begins to probe into the events leading to his predecessor's demise, he realizes he's also in over his head. McGregor is great at looking anxious, and well he might. "The Ghost Writer" is a one-stop anthology of Polanski's edgy themes. In just over two hours we get moral corruption, violence, voyeurism, black comedy, escalating claustrophobia and dagger-sharp cultural satire.
Every aspect of the production, from set design to casting to the unhurried, deliberate editing, hints at sinister secrets. The palette is exquisitely gloomy. Alexandre Desplat's music recalls the nervous soundscapes of Bernard Herrmann's Hitchcock scores.

Even performers in one-minute roles give their characters a suspicious aura. The publishing tycoon who hires the Ghost is excellently played by Jim Belushi, an actor who projects the self-confidence of a rhinoceros, and also the intellect. In a world where this man runs a media empire, nothing good can happen.

Most of the action takes place on wintry, rain-swept Martha's Vineyard inside the publisher's beach house, which resembles a luxurious modern dungeon. The Ghost's assignment is too good to be true: a quarter-million dollars for a one-month rewrite of Lang's manuscript. The book promises to be a bestseller, a boost to the controversial politician's reputation, and a step up for the hired writer, whose last effort was a popular magician's memoir called "I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered."

But trouble begins for the ghostwriter as soon as he leaves the publisher's office. Muggers clobber him, stealing a document they mistake for Lang's book. Outside the oceanfront compound angry protesters wave placards accusing the P.M. of war crimes; inside the atmosphere is tense. Lang's arch, intelligent wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) has spent years concealing damaging facts about her husband. Is she angry about his ill-disguised affair with his aide Amelia (Kim Cattrall) or something more? Everyone appears to know more than they let on.

The film is talky but the talk is very good, as layer upon layer of intrigue, lies and seduction -- sexual and intellectual -- build up. Polanski co-wrote the script with novelist Robert Harris, and it is a model of economical construction. The plotting is airtight, the mystery unfolds without cheap tricks or gimmicks. There is no tacked-on exposition, no convenient coincidences, and the back story is revealed by minute degrees. The Ghost is smart, but no genius, and what people tell him usually is a self-serving story that bears only a passing resemblance to the facts.

As Lang, Brosnan does the best acting of his career. The details of posture and expression are flawless. When he's introduced to the Ghost he looks directly into the camera, at the audience. "Hello," he says, tilting his head back and looking dismissively down his nose. "Who are you?" When they begin their interviews, he faces the Ghost slouching on a sofa, arms back and legs widespread like a seductive lounge lizard. Though he'd clearly rather eat glass than be interrogated by this pipsqueak, he slips into manipulative mode out of sheer habit.

When he's hit by an indictment from the International Criminal Court for authorizing the kidnap and torture of terror suspects, his sputtering rage is fearful to behold. If he returns to England, he'll be arrested, so he's trapped in America under virtual house arrest. (There's a blackly comic moment when his advisers go through the short list of other nations that don't recognize the court: "Iran, North Korea, parts of Africa.")

Brosnan digs deep into the man, creating a physical language that reveals, as much as the dialogue, how desperate his character is to be loved and respected.

As you get to know the man, your eye may fall on one of the blown-up bestseller covers that decorate the publisher's villa. "Love: Worth Killing For?" it asks. Be careful about leaping to conclusions, though. The man who gave us "Rosemary's Baby" and "Chinatown" sees the universe as a place where easy answers don't apply and justice is rarely sure.

The finale is a payoff to an almost subliminal sight gag Polanski has been working since early in the film. It's explosively funny yet blacker than printer's ink. Polanski's sardonic vision always leads us to the tunnel at the end of the light.

[Ace]

www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2010/03/05/polanski_tells_a_good_story_in_ghost_writer/

Boston Globe

By Ty Burr
March 5, 2010

‘The Ghost Writer’’ is a minor treat from a major filmmaker, an entertainment put together with dark, elegant confidence. It’s not a work that needs to be reckoned with, like 2002’s “The Pianist.’’ If you boycott Roman Polanski on principle, as is your right, you can sleep untroubled by thoughts of the masterpiece you might be missing. Yet it has to be said: Another director would almost certainly have bobbled this devilish mixture of paperback suspense, political chicanery, and jet-black comedy. In Polanski’s hands, it’s an unholy pleasure: a diversion that stings.

Adapted by the director from Robert Harris’s 2007 novel “The Ghost,’’ the movie concerns a hack writer played by Ewan McGregor - tellingly, we never learn the character’s name; like the heroine in “Rebecca,’’ he’s in thrall to people bigger than he - who’s hired to ghost-write the memoirs of Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), Britain’s newly ex-prime minister. The previous ghostwriter died in mysterious circumstances, his body washing up far from the ferry he supposedly jumped off.

With four weeks to adapt the manuscript and Lang about to be subpoenaed by the Hague, our Ghost is initially unwilling, but the money’s good and the chance to sit at the power table is irresistible. He’s quickly installed at Lang’s residence-in-exile, a swank high-tech fortress on Martha’s Vineyard. (Due to Polanski’s, ah, legal problems, German locations convincingly substitute.) The vibe is nearly as gothic as Manderly in “Rebecca,’’ complete with two Mrs. Danvers: Lang’s trim, all-knowing aide Amelia (Kim Cattrall in a neat career game-changer) and the ex-PM’s tightly wound wife, Ruth (Olivia Williams), who seethes at being miles from the action.

“The Ghost Writer’’ may be based on another man’s novel but it has been expertly tailored to its director’s abiding obsessions: murder and mayhem just out of sight, dark stretches of foreboding water, a hero swimming farther out to sea, hoping the sharks won’t bite. As is usual with Polanski, we’re meant to identify with the main character while groaning at his missteps; suspense here comes as much from the Ghost’s pesky human flaws as from the evil forces he begins to uncover. (When, in one key scene, the writer looks at himself in the mirror and mutters “bad idea,’’ you know he’s going to go ahead with it anyway. Take it as you will, but Polanski knows we’re slaves to our worst impulses.)

Lang’s most controversial act as prime minister was allying himself with America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - any resemblance to Tony Blair not coincidental at all - and the links between 10 Downing Street and US interests run invisible and deep. As the Ghost mines his subject’s past in interviews and increasingly secretive fact-finding missions, ugly truths gleam through the murk. “The Ghost Writer’’ is about learning to read between the lines of history, and of other people, and of other people’s manuscripts.

That makes the film sound like a political screed, when it’s anything but. Directing with deliciously cool flair, Polanski stages the film as an uneven battle of wits between a terrier and a roomful of tigers. McGregor deftly manages to keep us on the hero’s side despite our misgivings - the Ghost has prospered in life because he’s likably spineless - and there are choice turns by Tom Wilkinson, James Belushi, and dear old Eli Wallach, frail but still noodgy at 94.

The heart of “The Ghost Writer,’’ though, is the couple at its center. This Pierce Brosnan is a new one on me: expansive, dismissive, charmingly cruel, he wields power like a professional athlete. Adam Lang is Silvio Berlusconi in the body of Jack Kennedy; anti-war protesters are demanding the ex-prime minister’s head on a pike and he shrugs them off like flies. The man was born to lead, but in the name of what? One of the movie’s many grim jokes is that it doesn’t really matter.

For her part, Olivia Williams takes back some screen real estate after a few too many mousy roles (the teacher in “An Education’’ being the latest), and one of the pleasures of “The Ghost Writer’’ is watching Ruth Lang reveal infinite sides to herself one claw at a time: ignored wife, frustrated insider, forlorn lover, and so on. The movie implies that only dullards like the Ghost have one persona, and if they were smart they’d be content with it.

The larger enjoyment of the movie is finding ourselves in the hands of a genuine filmmaker. How rare that is today - a director who simply knows where to place the camera for maximum unsettling effect, who can coach actors to give their dialogue some topspin, who shapes a sequence so that what we don’t see is as important, more important, than what we do. Maybe this is a little like Bernini making a sculpture out of toothpicks, but craft is in the making, not the materials.

That said, you notice the toothpicks in the last few scenes of “The Ghost Writer,’’ as the pieces of the puzzle fall tartly but not unexpectedly into place and matters come to an appropriately Polanskian head. The movie’s a light cruise to the dark side, and it may be evidence that the director’s brittle, alluring pessimism has become so ingrained it doesn’t bother him any more. “The Ghost Writer’’ takes place on the Vineyard and in London, but it’s really set in Chinatown, and Chinatown is where its maker has made his home.

[Ace]

www.ebar.com/arts/art_article.php?sec=film&article=730

Bay Area Reporter: Tales of the rich & powerful

'The Ghost Writer'

Published 03/11/2010

by David Lamble


"Married?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Gay?"

"No."

"Just gotten out of a bad affair?"

"Despite 40,000 years of human history, it's impossible to properly describe my past relationship."

The Ghost Writer, an almost indecently entertaining movie about a charming, absurdly delinquent politician, has washed up on Cotton Mather's old stomping ground, produced, directed, co-written and edited by a filmmaker under house arrest in the home of the cuckoo clock.

At 76, Roman Polanski hasn't lost his feel for that lonely place where cosmetically enhanced, morally slippery over-achievers grapple for power, commit unthinkable high crimes, then beg our indulgence as they figure out how to sell their highly implausible versions of those crimes back to us.

The Ghost Writer opens as the Anglo-American handlers of Adam Lang, the recently resigned, freshly disgraced British Prime Minister (a slyly imperious Pierce Brosnan), struggle to replace the now embarrassingly-dead chump charged with putting Lang's once-charmed life between the covers of an already over-touted political memoir.

One of the cheeky pleasures of biting into The Ghost Writer is to appreciate how Polanski has concocted a surface tale of brazenly self-serving professional liars as mere foreplay for the truly cold-blooded story of how top-dog nations are governed.

The movie kicks into high gear when we meet the new chump, the never-named title character played to a T by Ewan McGregor, finally reaching his prime. Sporting the almost unnervingly boyish masculinity that is the trademark of such charming late bloomers as pop rock's Jon Bon Jovi or baseball's Craig Counsell, McGregor convinces us that he's a real adult capable of facing down Lang's brutal spin doctors and perhaps the "great man" himself, while at the same time giving out almost undetectable clues that he's the proper heir to Chinatown's Jake Gittes, doomed always to be a fatal beat behind the real skullduggery at the heart of this beastly story.

Like Gittes, McGregor's ghost writer is led to his doom by a femme fatale, or in this case by a diabolical team of female schemers. Olivia Williams is awesomely seductive as Lang's once-top confidant and now-spurned frau, while Kim Cattrall (Sex in the City) is very funny as the devilishly efficient, ever-so-slightly perky assistant who's terribly close to the boss. A key component of Polanski's bait-and-switch plot dynamic is our assumption that the mid-film bond between Williams and McGregor heralds a very different set of moral and physical dilemmas than the ones he actually faces.

It seems almost impertinent to put The Ghost Writer on the same pedestal occupied by Polanski's peerless collaboration with Nicholson, Dunaway, Huston and Towne, but the parallels in tone, theme and the earlier masterwork's uncanny grasp of just how and why absolute power corrupts make it obligatory. At the heart of Chinatown 's fateful denouement is Gittes' blind refusal to acknowledge that he's in way over his head. In perhaps one of the greatest exchanges in American film, John Huston's jocularly corrupt Noah Cross lays it on the line.

"Mr. Gittes, you may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you don't. Why is that funny?"

"It's what the D.A. used to tell me about Chinatown."

"Was he right?"

In a matching moment in The Ghost Writer, an enraged, caught-out Lang, safely nestled in his publisher's private jet, spews out the hard bargain in "Free World" governments' contracts with their citizen/subjects. As the ex-PM, Brosnan is jolly good at capturing just the right note of anger and contempt in the tone of a "great man" who's unaccustomed to spelling things out for a paid hack like the ghost writer.

"If I got back into power, I'd set up two airport lines. On one, we'd perform no background checks, no intrusive invasions of our citizens' fucking precious civil liberties. On the other, we'd do everything to ensure that people got to their destinations safely. I wonder which one the likes of you would choose to fly."

Employing non-intrusive technical wizardry that allows Northern Germany to stand in for the Kennedy crowd's favorite island hideaways in the Northeast US, Polanski uses simulated sex and rain as well as his patented free-floating paranoia to suggest political scandals hinting at but transcending the Cheney/Bush fiascos. The sinister, pristine beach setting conjures up the ghosts of Chappaquiddick and the death of liberal lion Teddy's presidential dreams.

The words never come up, but if they did, it would be fitting if McGregor's ghost writer got this exit line from his oppressively jocular Jerry Maguire-like agent: "It's Chappaquiddick, Jake."

[Ace]

Part article/ part review

www.laweekly.com/2010-03-11/film-tv/ghosts-of-a-filmmaker-s-past/

Ghosts of a Filmmaker's Past
Why the film Roman Polanski finished from jail is his best in years


F. X. Feeney Thursday, Mar 11 2010

Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer is one of his masterpieces — relentless in its suspense; funny when you least expect it; above all, deeply conscious of political power and its corruptions. In this latter quality it forms a third panel in an unofficial trilogy whose first two parts were Chinatown and Death and the Maiden. But — in an irony characteristic of his wildly eventful, weirdly punishing life — Polanski has attained this creative summit while lodging under house arrest in Switzerland.

The title character (Ewan McGregor), hired to "ghost" the memoirs of a disgraced British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan), finds himself occupying not only the job but the guest room of his dead predecessor. Suicide, or murder? That word ghost becomes ever more loaded as the cadaverish data pile higher. The dead man's clothes still hang in the closet (shades of The Tenant); a sheaf of hidden documents (shades of Rosemary's Baby) serves as a cry for help, a warning and a tempting key to still-deeper secrets hoarded by a gallery of unreliable allies: the PM's wife (Olivia Williams), his mistress (Kim Cattrall), and Tom Wilkinson, who embodies the question mark at the center of this maze, much as John Huston's Noah Cross did in Chinatown.

There is, however, a significant difference: Whereas in Chinatown the corruptions of 1930s Los Angeles were movingly personified in the love triangle that arose between the mystery woman, her monstrous father and the detective attempting to save her, The Ghost Writer has no such love story. Sexual alliances are so fraught with menace and appeal that neither the hero nor we can have any trust in them. "Bad idea," the PM tells his reflection in the bathroom mirror, before going to bed with one such partner — but, true to human nature and ruthless Polanski logic, he jumps in with her anyway. Similarly, any villain we meet is less an individual monster than she or he is a cat's-paw serving a larger, unseen interest. Noah Cross (owing to Robert Towne's superb screenplay) could proclaim a demonic philosophy when cornered, saying: "Most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they're capable of anything." Wilkinson's smooth operator conceals what he's thinking at all times, usually behind an inscrutable grin and lighthearted (if poison-tipped) reproaches: "A less equable man might find your questions impertinent."

The Ghost Writer is thus less heartrending than Chinatown but intellectually more ambitious. Behind its most dominant figures there operates a globally vast, falsely benevolent corporate entity called "Hatherton" — Halliburton, anyone? — whose philanthropies mask weapons sales, proclaiming: "We Keep You Safe From Harm!" In such a world, no head of state is ever truly in charge — nor is any organized populace. That is the real terror at work here, and for this lucidity Polanski is in debt to co-screenwriter Robert Harris, author of the novel on which the film is based. The news media are mindless pawns of these powers-that-be, inciting swarms of crazies to camp at the former prime minister's gate and cry "Murderer!!!" as he enters his retreat on Martha's Vineyard. (The whole British government appears to be camped in exile on this American isle of wealth, which gives the proceedings a certain Shakespearean, fairyland quality.) One can only wish we lived in an America where "war crimes" alleged against recent heads of state are so vehemently protested. Polanski's absurd bad luck is that his own wrongdoing of three decades ago is still causing such commotion, when more recent and more historically consequential crimes go unexplored.

And here our discussion gets tricky.

Given the outcries that have accompanied Polanski's every mention in the press since his arrest last September, is it even possible for The Ghost Writer to be judged impartially? As it is neither an apologia for unlawful sex nor a justification for jumping bail — the twin crimes of 1977-78 for which he has been brought to heel — its maker's personal status at present seems rightly irrelevant. Yet there is no denying that the cries of "child rapist" have hampered the picture's release. (Under normal circumstances, given its thriller's pulse, it might've had a much higher profile.)

I'm one of Polanski's defenders — not because I condone what he did but because I'm persuaded he has already been punished, and that the constant flood of vitriol being heaped upon him is no longer just. Let me be clear: Nobody but nobody has ever condoned Polanski's choice to press for sex in that hot tub — that's why he was arrested. Polanski himself refused to condone his own behavior, once it was made plain to him that what he thought was a Gauguin-in-Polynesia scenario of an artist seducing his model turned out to be something far more terrifying to the young woman. That she was physically mature and sexually active have never let him off the hook, either. Thirteen is just too damn young. (There's a common-sensed line from vaudeville that applies: "You're not too young for me, Honey, but I'm way too old for you.") Polanski was right to plead guilty, right to serve his time in prison, right to expect a whopping fine when he emerged. Unfortunately, as documented by filmmaker Marina Zenovich in her definitive Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, he was also right to flee the country. Justice malfunctioned so grossly in the court of Judge Laurence J. Rittenband that Polanski, who had fully cooperated up to that final moment, logically deported himself — content to let it be forever. Nobody protested his departure, then. Oblivion was presumed to be his permanent destination.

He has long defied that, and this may be why he is still so hated. He made amends with his former victim to the tune of a half-million dollars, has rebuilt his life and career, married and become a father, and — quite against the odds — found a way to make films so true to his gifts that one of them (The Pianist, 2002) won an Oscar for Best Director. Apart from the technicality of answering for his jumped bail, what moral or legal debt does he actually still owe society?

An answer is implied in The Ghost Writer, even though (apart from a few musical cues and postproduction nuances) it was completed before his arrest last September. The public figures that the swirling mobs so furiously denounce as guilty may certainly be guilty — most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they're capable of anything — yet there is always someone far worse, or a host of someones far more evil, who are making a clean getaway.

What has made Polanski's crime so particularly appalling is the recognition that he himself had survived being a defenseless child. How could a man with such exceptional vision be so blind to the defenselessness of the girl in his care? Having been robbed so violently of his own parents when young, by the Nazis, no less; having by some miracle managed, even so, to develop the strong conscience any artist requires — as his films reveal again and again — he nevertheless proved in a weak moment as capable of inflicting harm as any who ever inflicted harm upon him. His films ever since — particularly Tess and Death and the Maiden — are deep with the bitter wisdom of this. Cross' line about facing the fact that you are "capable of anything" is a truth Polanski has earned, in grief.

Echoes of this truth empower the best aspects of The Ghost Writer. Every character we meet is metaphorically a defenseless orphan. One feels this in McGregor's Hamlet-like uncertainty and impulsive mischief; in the rich fear and sarcasm that fill Brosnan's laughter; in the way Williams' hard, gemlike eyes are so paradoxically filled with suffering. Polanski is sensitive to every lost soul, but nobody is let off the hook. The elderly oracle played in a magnificent cameo by Eli Wallach is the only truly honest character we meet, and — this is no accident — he is also the most powerless.

Nobody is guilt-free in this map of the world, on this side of death — but as Polanski and Harris so merrily have it, that last, least-wanted of freedoms is easily arranged.

[Ace]

www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49618

Sight & Sound: The man who wasn’t there

Roman Polanski’s thriller about an ex-prime minister haunted by past crimes has acquired an extra twist of intrigue in the light of the director’s own arrest. Philip Horne unravels the tangled web of The Ghost

Watching Roman Polanski’s paranoid thriller The Ghost, it’s hard to ignore certain uncanny parallels between the film’s story and the story surrounding the film itself. The 76-year-old director’s dramatic arrest last September in Switzerland, with the intention of extraditing him to the US over 30 years after he fled the country, and the accompanying international media hoo-ha both seemed to mirror situations in The Ghost. In the film, the Blair-like former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) frets about having to remain in exile in the US; he’s there because it’s one of the few countries (others named include North Korea and Iran) from which he can’t be extradited to Europe to stand trial for war crimes – Lang is alleged to have co-operated with the CIA in sending detainees for torture. In The Ghost too a media circus starts and a long-running charge on the back-burner blazes up to become the top story and cause célèbre.

Journalists at the Ghost preview had to sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to publish anything about it till its release; in the film, the ghostwriter hero (Ewan McGregor) has to put his name to a disclaimer in triplicate before he can see the manuscript of Lang’s draft memoirs, which he has been hired to finish and ‘sex up’ after the previous (dull) ghostwriter was found washed up on a bleak Atlantic beach. I had been due to interview Polanski for this magazine, but after his arrest that prospect was understandably swept away in the storm of legal crises and publicity (even though it had been agreed that the interview would be strictly limited to discussion of his work). And a few hours before the deadline for this piece, it was announced that Lang’s original, Tony Blair, was to publish his own memoirs, entitled The Journey, in September 2010. Perhaps a ‘ghost’ is at work on them as I write. And all that’s beside the ongoing drama of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, which has seen the real Tony Blair testify on similar issues.
Is it pure coincidence, this chiming of the film’s events with those that overtook its maker? Somehow it seems unlikely. The movie is based on the 2007 thriller The Ghost, by the English novelist and former political journalist Robert Harris, which he wrote while working with Polanski on the screenplay for a film based on his earlier novel Pompeii (that film was called off because of the actors’ strike). Harris, who has said that The Ghost was influenced by the director, showed it to him prior to publication – and Polanski liked it. Harris has put on record that the novel was directly triggered by hearing a radio interview with someone who wanted Tony Blair (Harris’ former friend) tried for war crimes, noting that he could only escape trial by going to live in the US, from where he couldn’t be extradited.

The film is set in a fenced-off hyper-modern glass-box mansion on a midwinter Martha’s Vineyard (recreated on Sylt in northern Germany, for obvious reasons); the half-reluctant ghostwriter finds himself holed up there to work round the clock on the autobiography with the stranded, restless Lang, his outspoken wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) and Lang’s devoted PA, Amelia Bly (Kim Cattrall) – plus security men. Harris’ journalistic experience obviously informed the story, getting him close to Tony Blair and giving him a sense of the intimacies of power and, as he puts it, “the way one lives in the security bubble”. But Harris’ ongoing collaboration and creative friendship with Polanski could be seen as an equally vital inspiration for the novel, partly in the richness of the biographical ironies, which Polanski (before the case blew up so extraordinarily) must have found intriguing, but also in the numerous ways the novel feels like a perfect Polanski project – and indeed has been transformed into such a seriously enjoyable Polanskian film.

Harris could be read as, in a sense, ‘ghosting’ Polanski here, creating an auteur work by digesting and recombining elements from many of his films (not that Polanski himself, judging by interviews, is much concerned with his status as an auteur). To concentrate the film so much on an interloper coming to a lonely house by the sea inhabited by an unhappy couple suggests that Harris has seen Polanski’s powerful, unfairly neglected Death and the Maiden (1994), based on Ariel Dorfman’s play (it also concerns trials for torture) and the magnificent Cul-de-Sac (1966), shot on Lindisfarne; seaside homes also figure in Macbeth (1971) and in the curious sex comedy What? (1972); one might also mention the stormy marriages so severely tested in the claustrophobic close quarters afloat in Knife in the Water (1962) and Bitter Moon (1992). The theme of stepping into a dead predecessor’s shoes – inheriting his text, his room in the beach house, his belongings – also recalls The Tenant (1976). The dead man, McAra, is a haunting presence-absence in the film; at one point Harris brilliantly has his ghostwriter follow the unwiped satnav instructions in a borrowed vehicle used by McAra to eerily retrace his final fatal tracks.

In his S&S review of the film (May 2010) Michael Brooke notes how the film revisits Frantic (1988), Polanski’s ‘Hitchcock homage’ – the macguffin here being the manuscript of Adam Lang’s memoirs, whereas there it was a souvenir miniature of the Statue of Liberty. (The manuscript remains a visual motif – “almost a character in its own right,” as Harris puts it – to the film’s end.) Harris has remarked of suspense thrillers, “I like that genre and Hitchcock was the master of it”; this taste, shared with Polanski, drives the film along with a cool, dark irony. The political conspiracy unearthed through a coded message in the manuscript recalls the discovery of the witch’s occulted identity through an anagram in a book in Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – and equally the Satanic-bibliophilic messages in The Ninth Gate (1999) found in the variants in different copies of a rare old book.

The Ninth Gate – a deliciously dry, fantastical quest-fable set in the worlds of rare books and chillingly dull witches’ covens, with Johnny Depp as an unscrupulous book hunter – already seemed a self-referentially loaded reworking of the detective plot of Chinatown (1974). The Ghost reworks Chinatown too, starting with the hiring of our hero, who is disreputable and widely despised, but successful and just sufficiently sympathetic. We may suspect, as in Chinatown, that McGregor’s ghostwriter, who has ghosted celebrity memoirs but never those of politicians, is being set up to be out of his depth – framed, in his own phrase, as “a tethered goat”. Old photographs showing crucial past associations provide clues to the mystery, cropping up here as they did in Chinatown. Moreover, there’s an Oriental (here Vietnamese) gardener at the beach house, recalling the Chinese one in Chinatown (and already there in the novel). Harris’ droll, serious, very enjoyable novel seems to be channelling Polanski while drawing on his own experiences of politics and high-stakes bestseller publishing.

Adaptation

Given this osmotic relationship, one could say that the novel is as much an adaptation of Polanski as the film is an adaptation of Harris; indeed many of the film’s identifiable ‘Polanski’ touches can be found in Harris’ book. There are things in the finished film that don’t come from the book, including the nice sequence where the ghostwriter is followed to the ferry by threatening government agents and just manages to get ashore before meeting the same fate as McAra (which we’ve seen in the opening of the film). But since Harris was the film’s co-scenarist, working closely with the director, we can hardly say for sure that such additions are purely directorial.

Harris has paid tribute to Polanski’s skill as an adapter; he reports him as saying: “The novel is the screenplay.” This suggests Polanski remains true to the approach he’s taken since adapting Ira Levin’s (terrifically sharp and tight) Rosemary’s Baby. “If you’re a film-maker and you read a good book, you want to turn it into a film,” he said in 1969. “These are very primitive desires.” As he said of that first adaptation, in his superb 1984 memoir Roman by Polanski: “I reread the book… pencilled out the irrelevant passages, and dictated a preliminary draft.”

Polanski’s self-effacing but potent aesthetic is based on close attention to the original, rather than showy changes made for the sake of stamping it with his own personality. “I don’t think that he’s interested in a particular shot or a particular dramatic piece of cinema happening for the sake of just showing off,” says Harris. “It’s always story, character and logic. One of the curious effects of working with him is to feel one is writing the novel again, but getting it right this time around. There are things in The Ghost screenplay which are better than they are in the novel. We worked at it and made it sharper.”

It hardly makes sense to try and assign artistic ownership of a film born of such an intimate creative partnership. But this is not to say that The Ghost lacks the characteristic notes of the Polanski terroir: the atmospheric specificity and – often – melancholy that hang over so many of his films; the poetic sense of place and light and texture, bleak and beautiful, that reflects his disillusioned, agnostic, stoical sense of life as being painfully absurd, yet illuminated by flashes of humour and beauty. With its wild grey sea and sky, the wintry island gives the whole film a sober tone that matches the bereft state of the Langs in their isolation and exile. The odd, plush house in the New England woods where a polite but faintly sinister professor (Tom Wilkinson) lives with his prissy wife has a Hitchcockian unexpectedness, an intangible air of chilly threat, for the professor is linked to Yale, Cambridge, Harvard… and the CIA, and the film’s version of Halliburton. In fact, the film takes its time and observes the tone of relations and behaviour with enough patience to convey the boredom and hollowness of power, the nasty aftertaste left in the mouth by the Faustian bargain made by the lords of this world. (It’s richer and darker in this way than Frost/Nixon).

The beautifully judged pacing – with the ironic xylophones of Alexandre Desplat’s score keeping things light and mobile – gives a thrilling sense of everything shifting uncontrollably as the media story around Lang breaks and helicopters hover overhead. In fact the whole approach – sticking so closely to the disorientated ghostwriter’s point of view – yields constant little unnerving touches of danger or disturbance (a stranger muttering something unintelligible as he passes in a hotel bar, a cellphone buzzing suddenly). And it’s typical of Polanski’s sod’s-law view of the world that when, in a crisis, the hero really needs a cab, a free one comes along but simply refuses to stop for him. From the start, when McGregor’s ghostwriter pitches for the job in a London publisher’s office (a wonderfully done meeting, with James Belushi terrific as a monstrous power broker), creeping unease lurks in the margins; as a curmudgeonly editor comments, “There’s something not quite right about this project.”

About The Ghost, on the other hand, there’s something that is quite right – particularly the performances. Polanski’s own acting experience and sympathetic method (he watches the actors go through a scene, then has the camera follow where his eye naturally goes) bring out the best from a strong cast. Ewan McGregor, even managing a cockney accent, is the right kind of cagy but cocky chancer, with a cynical line in wit that carries us with him into the Lang world; with his refrain of “Fuck!” as things go wrong, he saves the film from solemnity. Pierce Brosnan’s Lang, meanwhile, is spookily hollow, an actor caught between roles, gnawed by the self-pity of tyrants, sulking that “I’ll go where people want me!” He is not likeable here, but we can see how he might have seemed so.

The heart of The Ghost, however, is Ruth Lang, courageously embodied by Olivia Williams as a witty, beautiful, ambitious, ragingly intelligent, frustrated, betrayed and jealous woman, the power behind her husband who is now counting the cost of the corrupt bargain she once made. She surpasses herself in a superb scene – apparently improvised by Polanski on the set – in which the camera follows a note that’s passed from hand to hand through a crowd at a party before finally being handed to her on the podium. The climax of this long take has the camera look up at her face in close-up as she reads the note – shock, anger, fear and confusion flickering across her strained features as, watched by a curious crowd of bigwigs and cronies, she is unable to express her private feelings. It’s a magnificent, moving, horrifying moment – and one that is morally charged. Polanski may be less directly engaged than Harris in the detail of British politics, but they are at one here in their vision of the small, unreal, dizzying world of those who rule us from their protective bubbles of power and wealth.

‘The Ghost’ is released on 16 April, and is reviewed in the May issue of Sight & Sound